Why have I been so quiet? Because something is coming. I’ll let you know when it’s actually here, but it has something to do with this.\
Also, something else is also coming at some point after the previously mentioned something shows up.
Category: development
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Something Is Coming
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iPod Virgin
I’ve come into some “free money” and I’ve decided to blow it on a sexy black video iPod. Oh, dear internet, what accessories should I get? How should I protect my new toy? What should I definitely NOT get?\
Thank you and good night.\
UPDATE: My iPod shipped this morning less than 18 hours after I ordered it! Come on, you sexy beast, come on!! -
Ubuntu Is Snazzy
Since I don’t have the mental capacity at the moment to concentrate on anything for more than fifteen minutes, I decided to try out Ubuntu, a “linux for the rest of us” distro that actually lives up to the hype. Install was insanely easy, even though it did take too much of the hard drive for itself (which was easily fixed with Partition Magic). The install was quick as OS installs go, the bootloader found everything it was supposed to and the usually problematic things weren’t. You know, the usual:
- wireless
- video adapter/monitor/refresh settings
- mouse
- sound\
Nope, none of those were a problem at all. It’s been awhile since I’ve used a linux distro for more than command line stuff (X on my Fedora box doesn’t even work anymore – stupid NVIDIA card) and running webservers. I’ve missed a lot of new stuff!\
For example, I’m posting this using Drivel, a journal client for GNOME. It’s simple, but it works (so far).\
I tried using Blam!, but it exploded with the 330 feeds in my blogroll. maybe I should have started smaller.\
Overall, Ubuntu feels like the perfect linux distro for folks who’ve always wanted to try linux but were too afraid to try. So far everything just works, and the install couldn’t be easier. So, don’t chicken out, get up with Ubuntu right now. Really.
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Tips For The Couch-Bound
Stuck on the couch with a laptop? Tired of your trackpad? ‘\
I have a little Kensington optical mouse I bought for travelling. It’s tiny (and so cute!), but it works really well on the couch cushion! So, I’m no longer bound by my clumsy fat fingers. I have true computing mobility again!!\
It’s the little things… like mice. -
Blogroll Changes
I know, you probably didn’t even know I had one, did you? But, I do, and it’s been updated. I used to use Bloglines to import it on the page, but I realized that that’s ALL I used Bloglines for, and it was a pain. So, I’m doin’ it myself now. I’m taking the OPML file exported from NetNewsWire and transforming it with XSL into the unordered list you see on the page. I’ve put more details and the files (so you can try it yourself if you want) on the blogroll.\
Is it revolutionary or even all that interesting? Nope. But, my foot hurts, the pain pills make me stupid and sleepy and this is what I do in between the extremes of the two (stupid and sleepy).\
Oh, and last night, I organized my del.icio.us tags and got the latest version of Cocoalicious so I can keep all my links organized (because they weren’t before, you know).\
If I can’t sleep tonight, I might play with doing something fun with my Flickr photosets or maybe something else. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just watch more bad movies. -
Movable Type Categories As Tag Cloud
Like yesterday’s post about del.icio.us tag clouds, this was an experiment because I was bored. I figured it was so easy to make the link tag cloud, it should be almost as easy to create one from my categories. The challenge is that I have almost 1600 entries (actually, this is #1600!): so many that I don’t want the number of entries in a category to correspond directly to the text size (because 200em is really big).\
All it took was a little PHP on top of the tags to do the category list.\
Of course, this will only work if you can use PHP on your server (and why can’t you, huh huh huh), and if you publish the page as a PHP file. You may want to change the way it increments numbers to get the right scale between categories. Play, and if you end up using it, please post a comment so I can come check it out.\
Here’s what I did (of course, this is the “meat” – you have to add the rest of the page around it):<code> <ul class="tags"> <MTCategories show_empty="0" sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend"> <? $count = <MTCategoryCount>; $fontSize = 1; for ( $i=1;$i<10; $i++ ) { if ( $count > $i ) { $fontSize = $fontSize + .1; } } for ( $i = 10; $i < 300; $i=$i+20 ) { if ( $count > $i ) { $fontSize++; } } ?> <li> <a href="<MTCategoryArchiveLink>" title="<MTCategoryCount> Entries" style="font-size:<?= $fontSize ?>em"><MTCategoryLabel></a> </li> </MTCategories> </ul> </code>
The CSS is pretty much the same as yesterday, although I’ve tweaked it just a little since then:
<code>ul.tags { list-style:none; text-align:justify; } ul.tags li { display:inline; padding:0 .3em; }</code>
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Late Night Markup Tip
Tired of writing markup? Make too many stupid mistakes, like unclosed tags, unescaped ampersands, unquoted attributes, etc? Stop writing markup in a plain old text editor and switch to an XML editor!\
I’ve been using OxygenXML to write markup for several months now and I find that I make far fewer mistakes there than I did when I wrote everything in BBEdit. I love the one click validated, pretty print, and that it has good code highlighting for other languages (its PHP highlighting is especially good).\
Using an XML editor should save you keystrokes too. Oxygen closes my tags for me, and shows attributes in bright red when they’re not closed. It even goes back and highlights the opening tag when your cursor is at the end tag. Nice.\
Yeah, it’s midnight and I’m awake. Gotta wait twenty more minutes before my pain pill, then it’s sleepy time. -
Importing Your Del.icio.us Tag Cloud In Movable Type
Someone on the Movable Type ProNet list asked how to import their del.icio.us tag cloud into thier blog a couple days ago, and since I’m stuck here on the couch, I’d see if I could figure out an easy way to do it… and you know what, there is!\
All you need to install is the very cool MTGetXML plugin, and create yourself a new index template. The important bit to add is this:<code><ul class="tags"> <MTGetXML keeproot="0" location="http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@del.icio.us/api/tags/get?" cache="60"> <MTGetXMLElement name="tag"> <li style="font-size:<MTGetXMLValue name="count">em"> <a href="http://del.icio.us/USERNAME/<MTGetXMLValue name="tag" encode_url="1">" title="<MTGetXMLValue name="count"> links"> <MTGetXMLValue name="tag"> </a> </li> </MTGetXMLElement> </ul></code>
* USERNAME = del.icio.us username
* PASSWORD = del.icio.us password\
Here’s what my CSS looks like to get my tag cloud to look the way it does:<code>ul.tags { list-style:none; text-align:justify; } ul.tags li { display:inline; padding:0 .3em; }</code>
And in case you missed the link earlier, here’s what it looks like. Enjoy!\
Update: And because I couldn’t sleep, I did the same thing with my categories. It was a little more involved (because I have some categories with more than 100 entries in them, I didn’t map them right to font sizes, so I had to do MATH!). I kinda like it. It takes some PHP (for the math bits), but it’s almost as easy. I’ll post my template for it later. -
5 In The Morning and Can’t Sleep? Time To Mess Up Your Blog!
I got about two hours of sleep. It’s really hard to sleep with a foot that’s on fire.\
You may notice a couple different things if you read the main page of the site. I’ve added a couple links, and moved some stuff around. What’s cool, is it took very little markup changes to do what I wanted. With the new three column layout, things were feeling a little cramped. So, on the main page, the stuff that used to be on the right is now at the bottom under the entries. It should clear out some room for the content and make it easier to read.\
The best part is that the different formatting of the menu on the home page is almost entirely CSS. I had to move the markup down there on the homepage (it’s just an include), and I needed to fix a couple url-encoding bugs to get the page to validate again, but to get the pics, links and feeds to line up the way I wanted just meant some descendant selectors from #body. Mmmm, I love CSS.\
I think it’s time for more pain pills… -
A Fun Javascript Puzzle: Shortcut Icons
Someone at work asked about this and I can’t find the answer. And, because my foot hurts and I can’t sleep, I figured I’d give it a shot.\
This is my attempt, and it doesn’t work in anything but Opera 8.5 (that I’ve tested so far), as you can see. Any ideas?\
Before you start, here’s what I found with my example:- Firefox and Safari both report no errors when I try to change the shortcut icon.
- Firefox actually updates the DOM to point to the new image, but the browser doesn’t display it.
- It doesn’t work in IE, but I had someone else test it and I didn’t get any more details other than it doesn’t work.
- I’ve only tried one way of doing it so far, but I can’t think of anything else that would work at the moment (paaaaaain piiiiiiiills).\
Got any ideas? Isn’t it a fun little conundrum?\
UPDATE: I’ve got something working in Firefox! Check out attempt two. It removes the shortcut icon link and appends a new one to the head. Still doesn’t work in Safari, and I don’t have IE at the moment to test, but it’s progress. If you try it in IE, please let me know if it works.